Prologue

People are always on my case about self-care. It used to be called me-time. Before that, I don’t know. My grandmother once mentioned enjoying a hand cream before bed.  

After college, my cousins said: Stop thinking about everyone else. Book a vacation. Go somewhere fun! Order a piña colada at the pool and flirt with the bartender. Bring him back to your hotel room. Have a one-night stand!

After the wedding, my friend Amelia texted: God, he wouldn’t last a day without you. You pay all the bills, do all the cooking, make all the plans. You should go away for a weekend. Remind him how good he has it. Book one of those cute Airbnbs in the woods and unplug.

When three years went by with no baby, my hair stylist said: You’re under too much stress, honey. You should take some time off. Wear a sheet mask and watch HGTV in the middle of the day! You know, it is still feminist to choose not to work if you don’t want to. He certainly makes enough for the both of you. You’re going to make such an amazing mother.

Even as they whittled down their ideas—an exotic vacation, a weekend away, a sheet mask—why bother? I wasn’t trying to be difficult. I genuinely didn’t see the point. Coworkers would learn of my upcoming PTO and say, “Good for you!” But they wouldn’t mean it. The tone that accompanies “Good for you!” is always high-pitched and hollow, unlike the guttural awe of a homemade birthday cake or showing up to brunch 10 pounds smaller. When you’re a woman and you do something for your own pleasure, “Good for you!” is just something to say. At most, the primary emotion behind it is surprise.

When I was 13 years old, my parents divorced and I wrote in a journal to each of them every single night for a year. I said that, in my expert opinion, they’d done a superb job raising me. And that I’d had so much fun at their house on their weekend. Momentarily emboldened by this gift of validation, I’d add that I was a little disappointed that they wouldn’t let me bike around the neighborhood with other kids my age, but to not feel bad that I was admitting this in their journal because I was only trying to be as honest as possible with them. As their first-born and only daughter, I knew how important this level of transparency would be as they parented me further into my teen years.  

My standing as a good daughter meant everything to me. So did my reputation as a good sister, good student, good friend, good girlfriend. No need to look in the mirror when everyone else likes the view.

In adulthood, my tactics only sharpened. I spent $8.99 on 1.5 ounces of organic cardamom for one recipe that I thought might impress my future husband and always dusted the baseboards on his side of the bed before he spent the night. Even three years in, I waxed every inch of myself below the chin and filled my eyebrows for every date and met the people in his life and learned their likes and dislikes and went to their special events and cheered them on and texted on birthdays and downloaded apps to destress so I could remember everything I had to do the next day and now I’m exhausted and a sheet mask won’t fix it.

Because I am angry. I have a rage in me, thick as lava, from being set up to fail. No one took a second to tell me that you can’t keep fawning over other people while you are rotting on the inside. Eventually your assembly line will crack like a forgotten bridge.

In bed at night, I can hear my rage. Gurgling little muahahas, planning when it will erupt and make me start over. Ever so quietly, the kind of quiet that’s far deadlier than shouting, it says:

Burn it all down.